The Wall Street Journal has published an article about the cable studios and their costly productions. HBO’s Game of Thrones is mentioned only in passing, as one example of the high-end epics that are coming, but it’s interesting to look at the figures that have been batted around for other productions in light of what we know of Game of Thrones‘s budget. The one that surprised me most was that was the claim (unsourced, mind you) that Starz’s Camelot was in the region of $7 million an episode. That’s half again the projected per episode budget of Game of Thrones, from a much smaller cable provider.

This leads us to wonder ... Camelot was announced after Game of Thrones went into production and likely had its budget projections made. Is it possible that some of the reshoots—reshoots which GRRM calls, in some cases, an attempt to do things even better—are motivated by HBO opening up the purse strings and increasing the show’s budget to be more in line with the latest crop of costume dramas? Assuming, that is, that Camelot‘s alleged budget isn’t a lot of hype over substance. The figure bandied about in the article is certainly a substantial leap up in production budget for the show compared to Starz’s previous original costume piece, such as Spartacus: Blood and Sand.